


why live on the edge when you can jump

by possibilityleft



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Action/Adventure, Established Relationship, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 18:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityleft/pseuds/possibilityleft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lin recruits Tenzin to help her catch a thief.  It's not exactly a traditional date.</p>
            </blockquote>





	why live on the edge when you can jump

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LizBee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizBee/gifts).



Tenzin's life was uncomplicated, and so was his job. He'd sorted through some of the mail, made tea, and added to the agenda for the next Council meeting. He liked his job as a junior clerk for the Council, though, he really did. There was almost something relaxing about the familiar monotony of organization and mindless chores. He spent a lot of time in meditation as he moved across the floor of city hall.

He was interrupted around noon, however, by Lin Bei Fong, who rapped on the doorframe of the tiny office that he shared with his fellow clerk Shu. She was wearing her uniform, the hard black armor a contrast to her soft curls. He smiled at her.

It was rare to see her here during work hours. As one of the most junior officers, refusing any kind of special consideration, she had mostly been working awkward shifts. It had been three weeks since they had been able to schedule any date more involved than dozing on Lin's couch.

"Can you take the afternoon off?" she said, without any prelude. His eyes widened in surprise. Shu snickered a little but Tenzin pointedly ignored him, getting up and meeting her in the doorway.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, voice low because it wasn't his coworker's business.

She shook her head. "No. I need an expert opinion on something. Police business."

Tenzin lifted his eyebrows in surprise. If it were anyone but Lin, he would think it was a ruse to take off work early. But that really wasn't her nature, and his curiosity was piqued.

"Of course," he said. He stopped in briefly to speak to his boss, and then they were descending the stairs outside, Lin's shoes clicking loudly on the stone.

*

"This is my first criminal case," Lin said. She had her hand in his as they headed through the streets to their destination.

"So you've been promoted?" he said, pleased for her. She was still working her way up in the ranks, which meant a lot of time in the traffic department for the most part. Neither of them tended to have good work stories. But that being said, traffic didn't usually work twelve-hour shifts, and she'd had a lot of them lately.

"I think it's more like my — like the chief wanted to tease me a bit," she said, rolling her eyes. That sounded likely enough to Tenzin. Generally Aunt Toph kept her teasing to non-work situations, but Tenzin was always surprised she had the self-control. She'd been the best of babysitters, he'd thought, although his mother hadn't agreed.

"You see," she went on, "it looks like an airbender did it." She held up a hand to forestall his objections, and he shut his mouth. "I know that you and Avatar Aang have plenty of better things to do. But that's why I want your help. I need an airbending expert to help me figure out what's going on."

"Of course," he said. He was profoundly irritated at the gall of this criminal. What did they expect to accomplish by framing airbenders? It was an attempt to stain the Avatar's reputation, no doubt, and Tenzin wouldn't stand for it. His father was an honorable man, and so was he.

"I appreciate it," Lin answered. Her mouth twisted wryly. "Not a usual date activity, I suppose."

It wasn't, but one of the best dates they had ever had included an emergency council meeting. Tenzin took the minutes and Lin sat next to him and wrote snarky remarks on a stray piece of paper. His shoulders had shaken with the effort of not laughing.

Lin led the way into the bank.

*

It had taken the bank the better part of a week to figure out where the fault in their system was. The balance in the registers was correct, but the safe was always short. For a few days Lin and a few other officers had monitored the tellers, but they could find no thieves. So Lin had decided to check the other end of the equation.

The bank's main security lay in its system of pneumatic tubes. The cashiers placed the money in envelopes and the envelopes into the tubes, which used compressed air to deliver them straight into the safe. The bank manager thought it was an unbreakable system. So he explained, at length, when Lin and Tenzin arrived. Finally Lin managed to peel them away and showed Tenzin to the tube system. There were twenty tubes leading directly into the large, locked safe, and a huge air compressor hulking off to the side. Tenzin had never seen one up close before. The technology was still quite new. And quite loud.

"Someone is stealing the money at a point after it enters the tube, and before it exits," Lin told him, speaking over the sound of the machine. "It doesn't make any sense. If there was a hole in the system somewhere, the whole thing wouldn't work because the air wouldn't be compressed anymore. It's part fifteen of the manager's lecture." She rolled her eyes. "I'm hoping you can feel something about the airflow that I'm missing by just looking at it."

Tenzin thought about it a while. "Have you tried sending tests through each tube to see if they would arrive?"

Lin nodded. "Twice. Once it was empty envelopes in the cans, the other time with marked bills. All of the envelopes made it into the safe. So either the thief heard about our testing and let them through the system, or he isn't running it all the time. My vote is a bit of both. It's got to be an inside job. And if it were just one tube that wasn't making it through all the time, we would have figured it out pretty quickly from the amounts disappearing."

Tenzin thought a bit more, but he was stumped. Finally, Lin turned to him with a glint in her eyes. "I want to try something," she said. "I think we need to try reversing the process."

She looked around, but there weren't any employees down there with them. So she pushed the right button and the air compressor shuddered to a stop.

"Come on, before they come down to see what's wrong," she said, smiling mischievously.

He hesitated. Lin hauled herself up onto the safe and offered him her hand. He took it and let her pull him up beside her. Then he went from tube to tube, sending a hard burst of air up each. A couple of empty envelopes fell out of different tubes. He was on the ground again, adjusting his cloak, by the time that the first bank employee made his way down the stairs to see what had happened. Lin helpfully restarted the air compressor.

That done, the two of them made their way through the building. On each floor, Lin used her feet to locate the metal tubing, and they examined the parts that were accessible. In an out of the way corridor, they found what they were looking for. Someone had carefully cut a circle out of one of the tubes, and then replaced it. When Tenzin had sent in his blasts of air, backwards, it had knocked the plug out. It was a small round piece of metal that left a hole that was just big enough to catch the traveling canisters. This wasn't anyone reaching in and pulling out money, since the tube wouldn't work if there wasn't any source of flowing air. The thief would have to suck it out somehow. He met Lin's eyes, reading in hers what he had just realized. How would someone be able to do that without airbending? He could have done it easily, but he couldn't think of any other method that would work. Perhaps if they had another air compressor? But it would be impossible to hide something that large and loud on the premises. You'd need an entire small room for it.

"I see what you mean," he said, and then, reluctantly, "I'm not sure that I have an answer for you on this one."

He expected her disappointment, but instead she just smiled a little. "I thought you could help me find out. I might need airbending backup."

He chuckled. "This from the girl who always won our bending contests?"

"Well," she said, teasing, "the thief might be better at it than you were back then!"

They were adults, so he didn't tackle her for a rematch. Instead he poked her in her ticklish spot under the arm and watched her jump back out of range.

Then she tackled him instead.

*

Some time later, the two of them were in the vault of the bank. It was difficult to pinpoint a time for the thefts, because they weren't noticed until the safe was counted at the end of the day. The thief was fairly consistent, however, in that he stole pretty much every day. They didn't want to scare him off, so they'd replaced the plug in the tube for now. Tenzin would monitor the flow of air and let Lin know when the thief was at his work. Then they could catch him red-handed.

"I've always wondered what police work would be like," Tenzin said. They were sitting on the safe together, Lin's heels making little clicking sounds as she drummed them.

"A lot of waiting around, mostly," she said, but he could tell she wasn't serious. She was always happiest when she was working. Even while she was sitting here, relaxed, her eyes were bright. She was ready for the chase.

It took some time for her to get her chance. They spent the time talking. If nothing else, it was nice to have a few hours to be together without other obligations. They'd managed to pinpoint which tube the thief was stealing from, following the damaged tube to its source, and around six o'clock the air stopped flowing from it. Lin dashed up the stairs, with Tenzin right behind.

Lin threw open the door. A man in a janitor's uniform looked up in surprise from his work at the tube on the far side of the room. Lin threw her metal cables, but one went wide and broke the window. As it shattered outward, the thief made his choice and jumped after it. They were on the ground floor, after all. It had probably seemed like a better bet than trying to get past Lin in the doorframe.

Lin rushed to the window and Tenzin followed her. He spent a moment examining the object that the thief had hooked up to the pneumatic tube. It was an ingenious little device, really, a tiny air compressor, set to suck instead of blow. The thief was clearly wasting his talents in stealing if he had the mechanical skill to accomplish this. He pocketed it for later. He was sure that Lin would want it for evidence. And Uncle Sokka would probably want it afterward, for curiosity's sake.

"Meet you outside," Lin threw over her shoulder as she vaulted out the window. Tenzin decided to leave by more conventional means and hurried toward the front door.

That turned out to be a mistake, as it turned out. The thief had been hiding in the lobby, not expecting the pursuit to return indoors after such a memorable exit. He was picking glass out of his fake uniform when Tenzin appeared. The man rushed out the door and Tenzin wasn't far behind.

That turned out to be a mistake.

*

"Don't move, or I'll slit your throat," the man said, and Tenzin really almost wanted to laugh. That statement belonged in a cheesy radio drama, not in his life right now. Maybe he wanted to laugh because he was a bit hysterical. He'd never felt a knife against his throat before and he already knew it was an experience he didn't want to repeat.

That was when Lin turned the corner and stopped so fast that the ground shot up a little in front of her in reaction to her emotions. This jogged the thief's hand a little bit and Tenzin's laughing hysteria dropped straight into fear that he was about to die. Lin's eyes went wide as she took in the scene.

"That's right," the thief continued. "Not one more step, Officer. Your friend and I are just going to go around the corner here, all quiet-like, and you're not going to follow. We'll have ourselves a walk. And you're not going to bend one clod of dirt, or he'll get it."

Lin lifted her hands, carefully avoiding any earthbending stances. "Okay, just like you said. I won't follow you."

Tenzin's eyes met Lin's for a split second, and then slid away. Hers were hard, and calm, not at all worried or desperate. He took a deep breath. He and the thief walked past Lin, her shoulders set as she strained not to move. As soon as they turned the corner, Tenzin slid away from the knife like he was wind. Lin dashed into view, cables flying. She looked relieved when she saw that he'd escape, but she didn't even pause before she was on the attack.

Tenzin's knees had gone a bit watery. Lin had calmed him for long enough that he could do what was necessary, but he'd still been uncomfortably close to bleeding everywhere, and that was not a situation he often found himself in. He was pretty sure police work was not for him.

"You can puke in the alley," Lin said, thumbing over her shoulder to the dimness from which they had both emerged, and while she cuffed the prisoner, he threw up his lunch.

Today had been the most exciting and terrifying experience of his life, he decided, wiping his mouth off with a hand. It was even worse than the time Bumi had tried to teach him to swim by tossing him into one of the deeper pools of the Nan Shan River.

But when he turned back, Lin was grinning at him, and he had to grin back.

*

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. He had to go down to the station and give a statement, and endure the other officers' good-natured ribbing about the experience. Aunt Toph told them, mockingly serious, not to play hooky so they could make out, but then she punched their shoulders, his first, and then Lin's, and smiled. So he figured that she was pretty pleased, which made up for the bruise he was anticipating.

As it turned out, the thief wasn't the originator of the device. His wife was quite upset when she learned what her invention had been used for. It was a prototype that had disappeared from her lab. Meanwhile, her husband had told her he'd gotten a great job at the bank and this was the reason for their income increase.

"He'd hidden most of it under his futon, though," Lin said. A few days had passed, and they'd managed to align their schedules again. She was leaning against him on the couch, shoulder tucked under his arm and speaking off into space. The sun was going down outside but neither of them wanted to get up and find a candle, so the shadows were lengthening in the room. Lin snorted with amusement.

"Get this," she said. "The bed was so lumpy that his wife was going to suggest that they save up for a new one! He could have bought fifty of them with how much he took."

"I guess he thought he couldn't bring it back into the bank," Tenzin said, and snickered.

"We'll probably need you to testify when it comes to trial," she said after a moment's comfortable silence. "Please identify the man who tried to shorten your beard permanently, that kind of thing."

"I see," he said, noncommittally. He had been trying not to think about that aspect of their investigation. Lin shifted in the dimness, pressing her hip against his. Perhaps she had been trying not to think about it too.

"I'll be there," he said.

"Of course," she answered, as if she'd never doubted.

She didn't have to go in to work until midnight, and had gotten up early to spend time with him. He'd been awake since four this morning. They dozed there together, enjoying the quiet.

It was, in Tenzin's opinion, a very good date.

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: "I'd really love some fic about a younger Tenzin and Lin having adventures and being a couple -- an established couple in their mid to late twenties, adults with their own lives. Most of the fic around seems to be about the beginning or the end of their relationship, but I'd love a glimpse of the time in between, when it was a functional long-term relationship. WITH ADVENTURES." 
> 
> The details of the crime in this story were inspired by the [French vacuum gang](http://www.geekosystem.com/vacuum-thieves-paris/).


End file.
